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I reported to one of my favorite mentors that I am getting a sense of how Jesus has put me in a “place” where either I rely on Him every moment of the day or I can’t deal with life at all! This is good.Also I sensed You, saying, Jesus, that I should let others plan something that I can be part of vs. scheming myself so much.

Notes from my sessions with my spiritual director, Fr. Mike Phillippino:Mary seems to be telling you to surrender! Someone wrote about the Big Silence: where people for 5 days get away from cell phones and computers

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I might need to let God turn me around and change my way of doing things not conquest and moving forward which has lots of pride and ego in it but, instead -Humility: not trying to control everyone. Become smaller…retreat into the Lord who is God ALONE. Let the Lord build the house, like God telling David that David would not build the house of God but God would…as in 2 Samuel 7 verses 8-17. ​He shakes us up….

Sit and praise the Lord and give thanks. Mary says the mighty will be cast down from their thrones. My throne of Prof. Chervin? To sit at His feet like Mary Magdalene – just present to the Lord, a student, not a professor all the time vs. always worried like Martha. This could seem like laziness but actually would be more productive because then God can use me better.

​John 14: If I go, I will prepare a place for you…on His throne – we can be like kids climbing up on His lap.

I can prepare for the future in the interior, not exterior and God will protect me! ​St. Alphonsus and St. Faustina taught that the more we trust in the Lord, the more He does for us.How can He reach us if we are all stuffed with plans and schemes?

On Tuesday I took a plane to Corpus Christi, home of the Ridley’s, of goodbooksmedia and this blog!It was a horrible trip but with little moments of grace:

2 AM text message from United Airlines telling me my connecting flight was delayed in such a way I wouldn’t make it to the 2nd connecting flight.​I couldn’t fall back to sleep so just prayed quietly and worked.

6:30 AM leave for Hartford airport. The wheel chair man takes me through security. ​He grabs the lap-top I point at and sticks it in my little suitcase. He leaves me at Dunkin Donuts for my ritual cappuchino.

Announcement: “Ronda, come back to security…you took the wrong lap-top.” On the way back to security I meet a frantic young couple yelling “Are you Ronda? You have our lap-top!”There’s was black and mine is dark blue but I never noticed that my 3 year old lap top was dark blue since I am Mrs. Magoo!I felt like an idiot.

What if I had gotten onto the plane with the wrong lap-top?​​The flight from Hartford to Chicago is uneventful.

12:30 in plane from Chicago to Houston: plane is turned around on the runway due to some mechanical problem. “Stick around near the gate to see what is happening, but you have ½ hour to grab a bite.”

I’m am getting upset but then I see a Mexican teen with a fat rosary around his neck. I pull out mine and chat with him. He smiles.I meet later sitting around waiting a non-Catholic Christian home-schooler who is working on self-sustaining living. We talk for ½ hour with profit. A Pope Francis moment, I think. (That is, moving out of my comfort zone to talk to non-Catholics).3:30 another plane goes on the run-way, but doesn’t leave until 4:30 because it takes a whole hour to load the baggage from the defunct plane to this one.

I’m am getting upset, but then I see a Mexican teen with a fat rosary around his neck. I pull out mine and chat with him. He smiles.I meet later sitting around waiting a non-Catholic Christian home-schooler who is working on self-sustaining living. We talk for ½ hour with profit. A Pope Francis moment, I think. (That is, moving out of my comfort zone to talk to non-Catholics).3:30 another plane goes on the run-way, but doesn’t leave until 4:30 because it takes a whole hour to load the baggage from the defunct plane to this one.I realize I will miss my flight from Houston to Corpus Christi.

A good conversation with a young adult who is studying to be a United attendant. I tell him I am never flying United again. He calms me down by helping me in many ways. He leave his seat next to me and persuades the attendant serving boxed superior snacks not to charge me even though he took my debit card.Due to Sister Act I actually enjoy watching players throwing basketballs into a hoop on the TV that automatically turned on to this. I got a sense that all this kind of thing is good and loved by God that humans do, as long as we don’t make them into idols – I mean sports.The attendant assures me that my troubles are over because when I get to Houston I will have the wheel-chair I requested and they will take me to customer service where they will arrange a motel for the night and a voucher for dinner.

Now, I walk fine and can even run. I need the wheel chair because I can’t stand for long periods of time. With the wheel-chair I don’t have to stand at the long security lines or the long line for customer service.Now is when “all hell breaks loose” sigh! I get off the plane and there is no wheel chair. I wait 15 minutes and one comes but an old gent who looks like 90 to my mere 79 is put in the chair instead of me even though he came out of the plane later. I accept that because he is so old looking. The airport person at that gate tells me a cart can take me.

Now I have totally lost it. There is old hag Ronda in her pseudo-nun blue jumper with the large crucifix, sitting myself down on the floor in front of the counter calling out“It is whole hour you haven’t sent a wheel chair.”​Since most of the people on the line are Mexicans, they just look embarrassed for me.

Just as I am about the call out: “I am suing United Airlines,” I notice a managerial looking type man at the counter.​I walk up through the line and start my spiel. He walked out the back door and around out to me and gestures me far away from the line. The upshot of my expostulations is that he somehow gets me onto the 9 PM flight that was presumably totally booked with standby’s waiting.“But, I don’t want to take some other person’s place who was on stand-by for hours, Sir?”“Look lady, you are now confirmed.”He sends for a cart which takes me to the foot of the escalator to the mono-rail to the next part of the airport. I run up the escalator to the mono-rail. Just as the door is about to close the cart drive runs in. I had left my suitcase on the cart!I feel as if senility has totally won and my life is over.I get to the gate for the flight from Houston to Corpus Christi.“Where is your boarding pass?”I pull out the one for the 5 PM flight.I see the other stand-by’s are going through the gate.5 minutes before they close, they shove me through!I spend my time wondering if it qualifies as confessional matter that I made this scene with my large cross so visible so that people could think that Catholics are hysterics?

This summer, starting June 21, I will be for a whole month in Corpus Christi Texas very near the goodbooksmedia.com web-site family, the Ridley’s!

I am already imagining a photo of some of us together who are regularly on the web-site, maybe invisibly, and authors of goodbooksmedia publications that all you dear readers will get to see at least on a photo.

However, there may be a little hiatus on RondaView while I travel and set up my lap-top there.

I like to make a sort of score-card in my head of the favorite word or phrase people use such as: “I’m worried,” or “It’s gonna be fine!” My favorite word is “old” as in “I’m too old to carry that – you carry it for me.”

I also obsess about perfect futures on earth, especially in the form of ideal retirement colonies I might one day live in where everyone prefers Bach to Lawrence Welk.

Concerning this obsession, I got a wonderful grace this week. Teaching the Vietnamese Sisters here in summer school about St. Teresa of Avila’s “God Alone is Enough” and St. John of the Cross’ “if you want to possess all, desire to possess nothing,” I got this huge grace in the chapel afterwards to really see that God Alone is Enough….that even if I one day am in a euthanasia non-Catholic nursing home, God would be enough!Enormous joy flooded my heart.

Of course, I don’t mean that I can’t wish to be in my ideal retirement home, but I need not be scheming about it all the time and trying to force others to devise it for me!

From Treasure in Clay, the autobiography of Fulton Sheen:About missionaries in Africa: “I went to a leper colony in Africa where there were 500 lepers. I brought with me 500 silver crucifixes, intending to give on to each of the lepers…The first one who came to meet me had his left arm eaten off at the elbow by the disease. He put out his right hand and it was the most foul mass of corruption I ever saw. I held the silver crucifix above it and dropped it. It was swallowed up in that volcano of leprosy. All of a sudden there were 501 lepers in that camp; I was the 501st because I had taken that symbol of God’s identification with mean and refused to identify myself with someone who was a thousand times better on the inside than I. Then it came over me the awful thing I had done. I dug my fingers into his leprosy, took out the crucifix and pressed it into his hand. And so on, for all the other 499 lepers. From that moment on I learned to love them.”

A cute phrase from an author I was reading, Susan Hicks Beach. She describes certain friendships as embodying “sardonic intimacy.” I have quite a few like that! Thanks be to God!

Years agoa prominent Catholic publisherasked me to write a very personal grief book which was to be entitled: Weeping with Jesus: from Grief to Hope. I wrote the book with lots of heart. It featured the story of finding hope after the suicide of my son but also talked about general things about bereavement related to my husband’s death, etc. etc. The editors hated it so much that they said I could keep the $1,000 advance but they didn’t want to publish it after all.
I felt very sad. I put it up as a free e-book on my web-site and many benefited but now one of my newer publishers Enroute Books and Media has come out with a beautiful edition.
If you click on Enroute Books and Media you will find a description of it under a designation at the top of the web called Titles of Chervin.

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​Because I love other books of Rumer Godden, the English Catholic novelist most famous for In This House of Brede, I pick up an older novel of hers:

A Breath of Air. One thinks it is a book about how to build a utopian island, but it turns out to be a denunciation of utopian impulses. The hero is a Englishman of the upper classes, between the World Wars, whose beloved wife dies, leading him to decide to get away from sophisticated London by buying an unspoiled island in the Pacific Ocean

He brings with him his only girl child. The pagan natives live in idyllic sunshine with fish and fruit. Although the book is not religious at all, the moral, that even people with the highest goals, without God, will subtly become manipulative exploiters, is worth reading.

​This last month I have been reading a fascinating biography of Bartolomeo De Las Casas, the great champion of the “Indians” in the Caribbean at the time of Columbus. It was written in 1902 by a priest, Fr. Dutto. I told you a bit about the good attitude of Queen Isabella in last week’s blog, but after reading much more of the book I want to tell you about other thoughts. Because so many hate colonialism and mingle with that hatred ideas about the complicity of the Catholic missionaries, I sort of assumed that their description of colonial times was biased.

Maybe so, in some cases, but this biography comes right out of the letters of De Las Casas to the King and Queen in Spain, and it is hair-raising in the descriptions of the lust for gold that blinded so many Catholic colonialists to the evils of enslaving the natives to get them to do the mining for the gold.

Author

Ronda Chervin received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Fordham University and an MA in Religious Studies from Notre Dame Apostolic Institute. She is a dedicated widow, mother, and grandmother.Ronda converted to the Catholic Faith from a Jewish, though atheistic, background and has been a Professor of Philosophy and Theology at Loyola Marymount University, the Seminary of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, and Franciscan University of Steubenville. She is an international speaker and author of some fifty books about Catholic thought, practice and spirituality. One of her latest is LAST CALL, published by Goodbooks Media.Dr. Ronda is currently teaching philosophy at Holy Apostles College and Seminary in Cromwell, Connecticut.You can contact her via e-mail by clicking here or by emailing chervinronda@gmail.com directly.Visit her websites:here and here.